Has anyone had experience of thinking about a business model similar to founders Pledge (ie committing to donating profits / shares to charity) but with a higher level of commitment (eg an independent trust gets to decide when to sell).
I’d be interested in thoughts on the pros and cons eg for:
Fundraising
Recruitment
Strategic flexibility (which would be to some extent lost, but might be worth sacrificing)
Not part of Founder’s Pledge, but AIM did consider quite a few models like this when doing our founding-to-give program. Our pledge is higher, with 50% above $1M being the minimum. Right now, both ours and Founder’s Pledge connect to individual giving (aka the profit the cofounder would take home personally) instead of, e.g., committing the company itself to donate. They are also both pretty “clean” models as they do not require a heavy administrative burden to take stocks, investments, deal with dilutions, etc.
Net, I think both models slightly benefit the companies with almost no impairment to them, which I think would not be the case with heavier models (e.g., directly taking stock, requiring company donated profits, etc.). Our reason for going this way was:
Our sense was that typical investors are far less excited about companies that would have to donate/take ethics into account and somewhat less excited about those who have given away any sort of equity
Our sense was the founders typically are founders due to wanting control, so the more control we asked for/restrictions we put in place, the fewer high-talent founders would be keen
The admin cost for this is pretty intense, especially for an NGO, so we would have to think that it would have a major upside vs e.g., someone taking a 50% pledge and donating via their own DAF or foundation.
Aside from these complications I also don’t see much if any benefit to regular founders of this “give away equity early” arrangement outside the scope of support from an AIM or a similar social enterprise organization that actually aims to help their business.
Founder’s Pledge pitch to founders (and other HNW individuals) is straightforward: pledge to give away part of your wealth when you think it’s optimal from the perspective of value maximization, donation opportunities, exit strategy, tax efficiency and they’ll present donation opportunities which align with your priorities and approach to evidence.
Whereas this proposal seems to be “give us some of your equity and we’ll decide if, when and what we donate it to”. If founders want a fund to do the allocations for them they’ll find funds that will accept their equity as soon as it becomes liquid anyway, and those funds will be able to make decisions on cashing out and disbursal without the admin costs of being small shareholders in many pre-profit or never to be profitable startups so they’ll probably be more efficient at doing so.
I think there’s probably room for more variations on the Founder’s Pledge model, but I don’t see this proposal being it in its current form.
Not specifically but in talking with investors, it was made pretty clear that they would not be happy to invest if their profits would be hampered from donations and we could only do it with our own money. Frankly, I think that makes sense. You get to donate your own money, not others. If you’re in a spot where you can be picky with investors, you can just get a higher valuation or better deal terms.